Weekly musings - Rethinking Crusades & abnormal TFR at my school

 

Another week, another post. This week, some of the musings from my classroom. 

Crusades

Began some real teaching as my World History class moved into our first history unit - The Renaissance (definitely one of my favs). In order to build some context,  I will usually touch on the crusades and the black death (if you have no idea about the black death, this is a great music video to learn all about it in 3 mins and 21 secs). To refresh my brain, I did a shallow deep dive and read some articles about the crusades. 

Related Fun Read List

Understanding the Crusades from an Islamic perspective TL;DR - crusades is more complex than a simple East vs West war on religion. "The narrative of the Crusades should have been presented as a complicated chapter in medieval history where people fought each other and also tolerated each other. But because scholars tend to examine the past with modern eyes, they could not see this complex reality of the crusader period."

The Crusades: Did You Know? TL;DR - Many crusades did not fight against Muslims or go near the Holy Land. Supported by notable saints, women and children participated, attacked slavs, other pagans, Jews, and even other Christians (they sacked Byzantine Constantinople on their way to Jerusalem)

Children's Crusade - just plain sad and ridiculous 

Rethinking the Crusades TL;DR - the way in which war is justified has shifted dramatically through time. Just as difficult as it is for us to justify the recent Afghan War, it is just difficult to box and label the multiple crusades that took hundreds of years

TFR - Total Fertility Rate

In my Human Geography class we are entering a new unit discussing population and migration. One of the key terms that we will be talking about is Total Fertility Rate (TFR). In a nutshell, the replacement rate for humans (to maintain our population) is 2.1. Why not 2 you ask? Because men (yes, not women, just men) are dumb and tends to die before we (men) can reproduce (which might be a good thing... kidding... not kidding). A more developed country (MDCs) tend to have a TFR below 2, a less developed country (LDCs) on the other hand tend to have a TFR greater than 2 because of multiple reasons - labor intensive jobs, religious, lack of sex education/family planning, lack of education for women, etc. 

So to make things fun and relatable, I created a survey for my students to complete 1) gender 2) # of kids they would like to have. For the most part, the desired TFR for women is always lower than men's and the true TFR for the country is usually somewhere in between. It holds true in the survey on my students. What is interesting is how close it was for my students. 2 for the boys and 1.89 for the girls giving an overall average 1.94. This is a really high number! Given that the country I live in, Taiwan, has the lowest TFR in the world (1.07) and US (which is what most of their passport country is) is 1.73. I guess the numbers are a little skewed thanks to the missionary community here wo averages 4 kids per family.